


Hand of God

by orphan_account



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 09:11:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3804859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern AU: The Stark-y Bunch move in next door. Cersei objects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hand of God

The Starks moved in not longer after Joff turned twelve. The father, Eddard, was “an old college buddy” of Robert's, and had recently accepted a position at his law firm that Cersei had, up to that point, hoped her loving husband would award to one of her own family members—or at least to someone he'd talked at any point in the past fifteen years. “We're Facebook friends!” Robert said, giving her one of his patented playful shoves. This one sent her sprawling over the counter. He caught her up with an arm around the waist and pulled her tight against him: the stink of his cologne was like snorting citrus oil. “You'll like him, I promise—he's almost as much of a frigid bitch as you.”

“Did you fuck him in college, too?” said Cersei, but Robert only laughed and reached between her legs with a careless hand.

Frigid bitch, maybe, but the next fact on the sheet was that the happy couple had six kids—which did explain why they were buying the biggest and most ramshackle house on the lane. Cersei said, “What are they, Irish?” Robert thought the mother might be; she was redheaded and Catholic, at the very least. Jaime, when she told him, said she ought to insist on moving out—before the property on the whole street halved in value from wear and tear. Robert, of course, claimed that having friends his own age would be good for Joff, and never mind that for all he knew the Stark brood were a bunch of maladjusted hooligans. She'd heard that children in large families grew up wild: starved for attention from the exhausted parents and attracting too much from everyone else.

They didn't, in any case, seem in a hurry to befriend her son. The oldest boys spent all their free time playing an abridged form of lacrosse in the yard, and while the pretty redheaded girl smiled and blushed when she met Joff at the bus stop, she was far too vapid to take an interest in his hobbies. The younger children had never been a serious possibility. Joffrey was too bright for boys his own age, let alone scruffy elementary schoolers. But still, she thought, listening to the six of them tussle and joke from her kitchen window, just across the fence—still, she would have liked for him to feel closer to Tommen and Myrcella. She'd expected to be irritated by the tumult that six children entailed: instead she was reminded, with the burning sharpness that normally heralded an allergic reaction or tears, of her own childhood, alone on the Rock with her brothers. All the savage purity of freedom at summer's end, with the jaws of autumn closing but not yet locked—she remembered one August afternoon in middle school, when she and Jaime still held hands more often than they kissed; she'd pushed Tyrion into their father's pool, and held his head under for almost a minute, until he broke the surface, screaming, the sun unbearably bright on his face.

She stopped watching the kids. But the parents were harder to avoid. She introduced herself to Catelyn Stark on the sidewalk in front of their houses—maiden name Tully, she found after five minutes' conversation, which wasn't noticeably Irish, but it was hard to argue with that hair. Eddard she didn't meet until later that week, when Robert invited the lot of them over for an impromptu barbecue.

Cersei had expected him to be handsome. Catelyn, certainly, could look obnoxiously good in everything from lamé to flannel; and the way she talked about her husband was not imbued with the smug complacency of a marriage's lovelier half. But the man who Robert introduced as “good old Ned” was short, dark, and plainfaced but for his gray eyes, which gave his expressions the sort of distant holier-than-thou emphasis that she had previously associated with cats and Jehovah's Witnesses. He shook her hand and smiled, tentatively, his body still angled toward Robert's. They really did seem to be friends. She went back to the grill, which was Robert's domain by preference, and viciously flipped a steak.

Seven months later, she knew what had to be done.

What she wanted to do, really. Had wanted to do since the first day the sound of his children's laughter carried in through the open kitchen window, and since she'd seen her husband wrap a possessive arm around the man's thin shoulders. Since she'd watched Mrs. Stark sneak up on Mr. Stark from behind, and kiss his neck, like they were in a black-and-white film, or some old-timey musical.

Certainly since Ned helped her drag Robert out of his house and back to her own perfect, spotless home, at the end of a later dinner party, and kept Robert from vomiting on the porch; and looked at her with pity in his eyes. He really wasn't good-looking. He had a long, unkempt face, a thin gash of a mouth, and the permanent smear of stubble seemed more like an apologetic beard. Somehow that made it worse, when she dreamed—

But none of that was important. What was important was that his son had stumbled on Joffrey teasing a stray cat behind the hedge; what was important was that Jaime had been in Hong Kong since March; what was important was that her husband came to her room more often than ever, said _good old Ned, and good old Cat_ made him feel ashamed to neglect her as he had.

What was important was that she wanted to.

It was easy enough to arrange. Robert took the children on a camping trip with his youngest brother, every year for spring break. The Starks, by contrast, never seemed to go on vacation; although apparently the boy Jon had once visited Iceland, and hadn't liked it. She asked for Ned's help with an issue of wiring in the basement. Neighborly soul that he was, he came over to take a look, though he freely admitted to be no great hand at electronics. Well, that was all right, she was a worse one, and she had more hair to singe. Laughter. He sat swearing in the darkness, surrounded by concrete and dust, and she went up and down the stairs a few times and offered him a drink.

“Please,” he said, without glancing up. He did have a soothing voice. Please, Cersei thought, and felt anticipation pool in her gut.

She made iced tea, and he drank it in half a minute, the sweat standing on his face. “Feel a bit dizzy,” he admitted, trying to get to his feet. She slipped an arm around his waist, and he leaned on her willingly, his eyelids drooping—at last, the colorless gaze was shut away. “Cersei,” he murmured, as she helped him to the living room sofa, and began to unbutton his pants. “Cersei, what...?”

“Shh,” she said, and kissed him. He tasted of tea and the drug. There was a softness to his mouth, a weak generosity, that she had never found in Robert, and had never looked for in her brother; she bore down on it, pushing open his jaw with her fingers, licking apart his lips. He made a noise of protest, and she slid her tongue against the inside of his teeth, and pulled back a little to nip at his lip. “<i> _Cersei </I>_,” Ned said, eyes opening. He had said her name already more than Robert said it at all in the course of their honeymoon. He sounded desperate, but sluggish, the clear edge of his fear buried by chemicals. She pressed her thumb to his Adam's apple, feeling it bob, and the crest of muscle underneath.

He almost pitched her off of him in his next attempt to sit up. “Ah, ah, ah,” Cersei told him, but privately she was glad her sedative hadn't downed him so much that he wasn't able to respond, and she freed his belt from his pants with a lightness in her heart, and used it to bind his wrists behind him. He was staring at her as though recognizing her after a long estrangement, the way he should have looked at Robert, but never had—his pupils had dilated to dark pearls, ringed by the barest line of steel-gray. “No,” he said, vaguely; “I can't, please.” But his legs had ceased their movements, one knee drawn up against the back of the sofa, and he seemed trapped by his own lassitude as much as by her weight.

“Of course you can,” Cersei said, and then, truthfully: “I've been very lonely,” rocking her hips against his growing erection. He moaned. “Poor Ned,” she said, slipping two fingers in his mouth. “Poor Cersei.” She shifted forward to brush the very tip of his cock through his shorts with her ass. It had been, truth be told, a long time since she seduced anyone, and she'd never before used _assistance_ ; but she had the distinct feeling that if she'd simply suggested a tryst, she would only have succeeded in destroying her chances of getting him alone. Cersei preferred the certain route. It was why she had married Robert, in the end.

As if hearing her thoughts, Ned murmured, “You don't have to do this.” Whether he meant the roofie or the rape she did not know. He was wrong, of course, in either case. Cersei understood necessity. It was fortunate happenstance when necessity aligned itself with desire. She kissed his cheekbone, his jaw, and the uneven whorl of one ear, with his frightened, moving eye a curve in her peripheral vision. She put her tongue to the pulse in his neck, and dragged down along the course of the artery, sucking bruises on the column of his throat.

After that it was almost automatic: to yank his shorts to his knees and palm his thighs, while he looked at her as though wondering why he wasn't shouting for help—the pleas that escaped him were muffled and thin, as though there was no air in his lungs. She rubbed his cock with the hand wet from his mouth, coaxing a response out of him inch by inch. Years of trying to get Robert off before he could force his way inside her served her well, and before long Ned was half-arching into her grasp, the odd, strangled judder of his movements more exciting than eagerness would have been. But also a distraction. Of a kind. She reached under her skirt to pull her underwear painfully to one side, fabric bunching in the crease of her thigh, and sank onto him. Strange, not to be touched anywhere, while she did this. She was so used to Robert pawing her breasts, to Jaime embracing her as though he would drown without her touch to moor him, that except for the satisfying push of his cock inside her she could have thought that she was alone in her house, with no one arriving or leaving, with nothing to do but breathe.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked. Slurred, really.

“Because you're not going to tell anyone,” she said. “Do you think Robert didn't explain about Jon? I know how much your wife trusts you. So you'll leave, instead. And you won't come back.”

She took him in up to the root, and he turned his face to the cushions, eyes shut. He had given up squirming, to her disappointment. She eased off his cock until only the tip was inside her, an inexact pressure against her clit, and began to move in abortive downward strokes, so that he gasped at the cold air on his balls and the retreating heat of her, and tried to roll completely onto his side, between her thighs. She trapped his hips and began to fuck him in earnest.

“Ned?” said a voice from the patio. “Cersei, have you seen—”

The screen door opened.

“Catelyn,” said Cersei, although she briefly considered using _Mrs. Stark._ And for a brief, dizzy moment, she thought, _it won't work. They're in love. They have five kids, and she's raising the spunk of his god damn affair._

Then she saw Cat's face freeze.

She'd won, she knew. Cat would walk right back out the door. Curious, how bitter was triumph's taste in her mouth. Maybe she'd been hoping—to be disproved. To be shown, after all, that she was alone, that she was sick and she was wrong, that the rest of the world had never broken so easily. But never mind. It was better to have won.

“Cat,” Ned said, soft as a hospital death, with the feeling leaving the body through its ends. “Please help me.”

Catelyn crossed the room.

“Get off him,” she said, and when Cersei hesitated the other woman seized her by both arms and heaved her to her feet. She struggled, and Catelyn flung her against the coffee table—what the fuck was that, taekwondo? Magazines went flying with a sheering noise, like scissors. Her arm really hurt. She must have hit her funny bone.

She could feel herself smiling. Her hair was in her eyes, a skein of gold.

“Ned,” she heard Catelyn say, “come on, here—” An elastic snap. Was she, Cersei Lannister, really now privy to the sound it made when a Stark tucked another Stark back into his boxers? How wonderful. How fine the world was. Then a great creak from the sofa, as Catelyn pulled him up.

But: “...going to be sick,” Ned mumbled, and then there was a production, wasn’t there. Just like Joffrey, when he was flu-begone. That exact petulant quiet. He was replaced on the sofa. Catelyn went to get something, maybe a knife. Cersei wasn’t sure what her role in all this was. She thought about crawling hastily over, rolling the shorts back down, and sucking his cock, but it seemed like undue commitment.

Catelyn had returned, in any case, with the wastebin from the kitchen.

Noises.

“My goodness,” Cersei said, precisely. “You’re a guest in my home. Is that any way to behave?”

“Are you concussed?” Catelyn demanded, reaching out with unaccustomed audacity and pulling her head up by the hair. She had a surprisingly strong, broad hand, and the inside of her wrist—the only thing Cersei could see from below—was white as a taproot.

“Not concussed,” she said. “Post-coital.”

That got the hand out of her hair, quick enough. It was even true. There was an itchy certainty to the perimeter between her and the world, which she recognized from the minutes after orgasm, although there was only a fading ache betwen her legs. It was as though her skin had all become one scab. The carpet-fiber on her knees, rough as wire—the sound Catelyn made, of horror and frustration.

“Get up,” Catelyn said. For a moment Cersei thought she was going to touch her again, in that strange, callous, unstinting way: like a nurse with a coma patient. An old man, turned over to prevent bed sores. She was prepared to fold up her legs and lie limp, if that were the case. A game from earliest childhood: how heavy can you be? Somehow, Cersei thought, she had contrived to get herself alone in a room with two parents. That was a good trick.

“Get _up._ ”

“You know, he’s really just had a little too much to drink. It’s sure inventive, though, isn’t it? Crying wolf.”

“I need your help to carry him.”

“What?”

Catelyn jerked her thumb upward. Ned had fallen asleep, propped up against his wife's arm.

“Oh, well,” said Cersei, with a slow-growing smile, “that's not necessary. Surely? He can sleep it off on the couch.”

“I'll call your husband, then.”

“Let's not be petty. You think _Robert_ thinks men can be raped?”

“I'll write to your brother.”

This slides some things sideways, like tilting a frame. There's nothing outside the frame. Cersei squints at the woman. That red crown. It flares bright in her suddenly blurry vision, her dry and then her burning, sweating eyes. “You're sick, Cat.”

“Believe me, I wouldn't have you touch him if he were all there. But for god's sake. It's fifty yards.”

“What about the _children_? What on earth will they think?”

“That their father is ill. That our neighbor agreed to help us.”

She seemed utterly serious. She was shaking Ned, jogging his head a little, trying to get him to open his eyes. His mouth was slick from the vomit. It was not as though there was any difference, really, between the tenderness of this moment, in her own darkened living room, and what Cersei had thought was the end of a marriage. The faces were the same. The late afternoon sunshine. The hatred. But: “When you put it like that,” Cersei said, “how can I resist?”


End file.
